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Re: Higher level languages as part of the core of SVN

From: Giovanni Bajo <rasky_at_develer.com>
Date: 2006-10-20 14:26:47 CEST

Garrett Rooney wrote:

> The real kicker though, and the reason that Lua is in my opinion a
> more practical solution than doing the same sort of thing in a
> language like Perl or Ruby or Python is that Lua is tiny. The entire
> lua5.1 interpreter on my Ubuntu machine is 124k.

I don't get this. You're suggesting a non-mainstream under-supported
second-class higher level language, just because the interpeter has a lower
footprint than, say, Python? I don't remember anyone being concerned with
Mercurial's memory occupation, or svk's.

I sincerely believe that choosing anything which is not Perl or Python is
going to just go against us, in that people are not going to learn a
language just to contribute to Subversion. It is already hard enough to get
external contribution if you use a first-class language.

> The actual Lua 5.1
> codebase is just under 17000 lines of code, and is written in pure C89
> (with the exception of some platform specific code for dlopen type
> stuff, but it's already at least as portable as APR is, so no worries
> there). It's also built for doing this sort of thing, calling C and
> being called from it, which means it's far more practical to do things
> like that in Lua than it is to do similar things in the other popular
> scripting languages.

Would you elaborate on why the svn command line client should support a C
interface? I understand that we want to go higher-level for the svn* command
line utils, but why should they expose an interface for being called from C
applications?

-- 
Giovanni Bajo
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Received on Fri Oct 20 14:26:57 2006

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